This invention relates generally to a diagnostic system and method for testing one or more different areas of phonological awareness, phonological processing, verbal short term memory, rapid access naming, phonemic decoding and reading fluency in order to determine if the individual being tested is at risk to having reading problems and the areas in which the individual may need further training.
It is well known that a relationship exists between phonological processing abilities of an individual and the normal acquisition of beginning reading skills. For inefficient and disabled readers, the reading impasse exists in the perceptual and conceptual elusiveness of phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest units of speech that correspond to the sounds of our spoken language. Our phonologically based language requires that students have a sensitivity to and an explicit understanding of the phonological structure of words. This explicit understanding of the phonological structure of words is known as phonological awareness. Phonological awareness skills are displayed by an individual when the individual is able to isolate and identify individual sounds within words and to manipulate those identified sounds. Phonological processing refers to the use of information about the sound structure of oral language to process oral and written information. These include verbal short term memory and rapid access naming.
The English language has words that are comprised of sounds in some predetermined order. From the vast number of possible sequences of sounds, words in the English language actually use a relatively small number of sequences and the majority of these sequences are common to many words. A child who becomes aware of these common sound sequences is typically more adept at mastering these sequences when the words are presented in their printed form (i.e., when the child is reading the words) than a child who lacks this awareness of sounds. For example, the word "mat" has three distinct phonemes /m/, /ae/ and /t/. The words "sat" and "bat" have different initial phonemes, /s/ and /b/ respectively, but share the middle and final phonemes (/ae/ and /t/, respectively) that form the common spelling pattern "at". To a child with normal phonological awareness, our alphabetic orthography appears to be a sensible system for representing speech in writing. Thus, a child may employ the strategy of sounding out unknown words or letter sequences by analogy to known words with identical letter sequences. For example, the child may pronounce the unknown word "bat" by rhyming it with the known word "cat".
Phonological awareness skills are grouped into two categories including synthesis and analysis. Phonological synthesis refers to the awareness that separate sound units may be blended together to form whole words. Phonological analysis refers to the awareness that whole words may be segmented into a set of sound units, including syllables, onset-rimes and phonemes. Both analysis and synthesis skills have been identified as important prerequisites for achieving the goal of early reading skill proficiency and deficits of either and/or both of these skills are typically present in children with reading disabilities.
In addition to these phonological awareness skills, there are two other phonological skills that have been linked to efficient reading ability. These skills are phonetic coding in verbal short term memory and rapid, automatic access to phonological information. Phonetic coding refers to the child's ability to use a speech-sound representation system for efficient storage of verbal information in working memory. The ability to efficiently use phonetic codes to represent verbal information in working memory may be measured by performance on memory span tasks for items with verbal labels. Children with reading problems have been found to perform poorly on memory span tasks for items with verbal labels. Thus, phonetic coding is an important skill for a reader, such as a beginning reader. For a beginning reader, he/she must 1) first decode each sound in the pattern by voicing the appropriate sound for the appropriate symbol; 2) store the appropriate sounds in short term memory while the remainder of the symbols are being sounded out; and 3) blend all of the sounds from memory together to form a word. The efficient phonetic representation in verbal short term memory permits beginning readers to devote less cognitive energy to the storage of sound symbol correspondence thus leaving adequate cognitive resources to blend the sounds together to form the word.
The strong performance of a child on rapid naming skills that requires rapid and automatic access to phonological information that is stored in long term memory is highly predictive on how well a child will learn fluent word identification skills. A reading-disabled child may normally perform much more slowly on these rapid naming tasks than a child with a normal reading skill. The rapid access of phonological information in memory may make the task of assembling word parts together much easier so that reading is easier.
In addition to assessing phonological processing skills that do not require knowledge of print, three other measures of pre-reading and reading skills prove helpful in monitoring a child's growth once reading instruction begins. In particular, the child's knowledge about letters, the child's phonemic decoding skill and the child's fluency of reading should be monitored during the first three grades in order to identify the need for early intervention that will prevent reading problems later on. It is desirable to be able to test these pre-reading and reading skills in order to further determine if a child is at risk.
Returning to the relationship between phonological processing and reading, an individual with good phonological processing skills and good phonological awareness tends to be better able to learn to read. In addition, phonological processing deficits have been identified by researchers as the most probable cause of reading-related learning disabilities. Due to this link, many states have started to mandate phonological awareness training as part of regular classroom reading curricula. At the same time, school personnel are being required to be accountable and take responsibility for the classroom curriculum and the remedial reading services they provide. The problem is that there is no diagnostic tool currently available to help professionals and the school personnel to identify children who are at-risk due to phonological awareness deficit and to help plan, evaluate and document the effectiveness of intervention and instructional methods.
A number of assessment tools are presently available to professionals to measure phonological processing and related skills. These include the Test of phonological Awareness (TOPA), the Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test (LAC), The Phonological Awareness Test (PAT), the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Testing (CTOPP) and a screening measure published in an educational textbook, Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum. None of these conventional assessment tools are software based and therefore have limitations. For example, these conventional assessment tools must be manually administered so that the testing is not necessarily standardized since each test giver may give the test in a slightly different manner that reduces the reliability of the resulting assessment. These manually administered assessment tools also make the scoring, charting and comparison of the test results more difficult. These conventional assessment tests require that a skilled person administrate the assessment test. In addition, the number of children who may be tested at any one time is limited to one child for each test administrator. These conventional assessment tests may also cause test anxiety that may cause the test results to inaccurately reflect the child's abilities. Thus, it is desirable to provide a diagnostic system and method for phonological awareness testing that overcomes the above problems and limitations of conventional assessment tests and it is to this end that the present invention is directed.